Rambling Through Ulster County

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: June 30, 1995

LONG before Ulster County, New York, came into being, Indians of the Mingua nation planted maize in the fields around present-day Kingston. They fished and hunted. They lived the good life. They called their domain "the pleasant land."

Well, fair enough. The no-frills appellation suggests that the Mingua (the Mingos of James Fenimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales") were a judicious people, not inclined to boosterism, ill-adapted to practice the dark arts of public relations and advertising. In short, reliable.

The pleasant land of Ulster County lies along the west bank of the Hudson River, about 100 miles north of Manhattan. It is neither spectacular nor chic. If its principal towns -- Kingston, Woodstock, Saugerties and New Paltz -- could qualify as jewels, they would be small carat. The scenery delights and soothes rather than overwhelms. It is a land of small pleasures.

Ulster County has a little of this, a little of that. It has vineyards and rolling hills. It has large forests, lakes and reservoirs. It has ice caves. It has not one but two mountain ranges, the Shawangunks and the Catskills, and two splendid parks. It has decent restaurants, a microbrewery and its very own wine trail. It has an annual garlic festival. It is, in the words of a turn-of-the-century guidebook, "a land flowing with milk and honey, a land of corn and wine." Thumbs up to all of the above.

Manhattan's Dutch heritage survives only in its place names. But in Ulster County, the Dutch influence pops up at every turn in the form of stone houses, many of them built in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Built of Shawangunk (that's pronounced SHON-gum, locally) grit, with sloping, high-pitched wooden roofs, the houses have distinctive jambless fireplaces that date back to medieval Flanders.

Ulster County takes great pride in these little houses. Huguenot Street in New Paltz has six, making it the oldest street in the United States with its original houses. One, the Jean Hasbrouck Memorial House, was named by the Architectural Record of March 1926, a monthly trade publication, as the finest example of medieval Flemish stone architecture in North America, a rather arcane honorific, but the house is indeed eye-catching. The local Huguenot Society operates tours of the houses on Huguenot Street and of Locust Lawn, a nearby 1814 Federal mansion once occupied by Josiah Hasbrouck, the local grandee. The little town of Hurley has 10 stone houses and 15 others are nearby.

Many of the stone houses carry on as private homes and inns. One is Baker's Bed and Breakfast, outside Stone Ridge, a farmhouse built in 1780. Baker's sits on high ground overlooking a few nearby farms, a gaggle of geese and, off in the distance, the tower at Mohonk Mountain House, the county's most renowned resort. The farmhouse is a gem, a tight-knit package of stone, thick beams and foot-wide floor planks. Upstairs, it still has the original wall paint, made with buttermilk and blueberries. The smell of wood smoke permeates the place, and in cool weather, a cast-iron stove in the communal living room radiates warmth and slowly sends the resident cat, curled underneath, into a narcotic daze.

My wife and I took a room with private bath for $98 a night. It had a solid old four-poster bed, a rusticated armoire and a dresser. They built solid in the old days, but they didn't build big. The bathroom and the closet occupied mere niches. Nevertheless, the room was cozy and pleasing to the eye.

There's something important to know about geese. They rise early, and they celebrate the morn with a "Hallelujah" Chorus of honks that continues for a very long time. You'd think that a toot or two would do it, but no. Geese go at it with the gusto of a barroom drunk into the third verse of "My Way."

No problem rising for breakfast, which is huge. One morning it was eggs Benedict with sauteed Jerusalem artichokes, scones with raspberry jam and smoked trout. The next it was homemade granola and yogurt, ham and something called a Dutch baby, sort of a glorified popover with a thick, almost custardy base. It comes out of the oven in a crock, it's eaten with maple syrup and it is very, very good. Heading Out

Stone Ridge turned out to be a good base of operations. It is attractive but not twee, little more than a few stone houses strung along a state road, along with the imposing Inn at Stone Ridge (known locally as Hasbrouck House). The inn, a Dutch Colonial mansion, has a highly inviting little tavern just inside the entryway with three local beers on tap, all from the Woodstock Brewery in Kingston: Hudson lager, Big Indian porter and St. James ale. The inn's restaurant, Milliways, specializes in regional American cuisine. The extensive wine list is all-American.

Another advantage to Stone Ridge is its proximity to High Falls, a tiny hamlet with much historical interest. Like many other towns in Ulster County, High Falls is witness to an economy that came and went. It flourished in the heyday of the Delaware & Hudson Canal, built in 1828 to carry household coal from northeastern Pennsylvania to Kingston, where it was transferred to large barges that floated down river to New York City. High Falls had the highest concentration of locks on the canal, five of them, which raised or lowered barges 70 feet. The railroad made the canal obsolete by the late 19th century, and High Falls settled into a doze.